


Beginning of a Small Sanctuary

by cricket_aria



Category: Silent Hill 3 - Fandom
Genre: Bonding, Gen, Grieving, Post-Canon, discussions of in-canon character death, hints of Alessa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 10:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5160242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricket_aria/pseuds/cricket_aria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even though they've made it safely away from Silent Hill, there are trials coming that Douglas realizes Heather isn't expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beginning of a Small Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uumuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/gifts).



> Heather is called Heather in the narration but Cheryl in most of the dialog because I figure that even if he tries to honor her wishes and call her by the name her father gave her it's going to take Douglas more than a few hours to stop thinking of her with the name he knows her by.

They didn’t speak during the trip away from Silent Hill, but it was no longer the awkward silence that had taken up most of their trip in when he’d quickly discovered that there was no safe topic he could bring up with Heather in the state she was in; her father’s influence was woven so closely through her life that any innocuous question about it brought back memories which could only bring her pain that night. Douglas was happy for her about that in a way, although he held his tongue about that, sure that saying as much would get him a snap of her temper. He knew once some time had gone by and she could think about the past without it breaking her heart she’d be glad she could find so much happiness in it. Different and better than it was for him when he remembered his boy, where, for all that he’d loved him, Douglas had to stretch his mind back for ages to find any memories that weren’t tainted by anger or disappointment.

That awkwardness had been wiped away, a day and a half of utter insanity that no one else would ever possibly believe one hell of a way to break the ice between them. He’d recommend it to anyone searching for new trust building exercises. The new silence between them was just borne of exhaustion, conversation made difficult when yawns kept cutting off their words when there was no longer terror and anger keeping them running. He wouldn’t have even let her drive if he could have done it with his busted up leg and they didn’t both have the nagging fear that if they stopped to sleep instead of getting away while the chance was there they’d somehow end up trapped.

Mostly just the second, honestly. Even if his leg was fine Douglas knew he wasn’t in much of a state for driving either.

It was still at least a good hour before sun-up when Heather suddenly came to a stop right in the road, the city around them luckily still mostly asleep so there was no blaring of horns behind them. He’d almost fallen into a doze but was instantly awake at that, looking around for some new threat. Instead he saw that they were a few yards from the entrance of a parking garage, the brightly lit shape of a hospital hulking behind it.

Heather was clutching the steering wheel, and through it was too dark to see he was sure her knuckles had to be white. She was staring straight ahead, her expression close to blank. When she realized he was watching her she sucked in a deep breath and said, “I really _hate_ hospitals. I dunno if I could have made myself go into Brookhaven if I’d been able to remember a little bit more then, and that wasn’t even the same kind.”

He’d found enough scraps of information about Alessa’s past during his own investigations after they’d separated in Silent Hill to realize that hatred was well earned, born from a kind of pain he couldn’t even _imagine_ suffering through. That had been part of what had made up his mind to go and confront Claudia himself, he hadn’t wanted that woman and the horrors she represented having anything more to do with the poor kid. But before he could tell her that it was alright if she didn’t want to go in herself, that good lord but he could understand if she could never stand to face so much as a single gurney, she sat up a little straighter and pulled into the garage and followed the signs to the floor for emergencies. 

And damned but he was proud of her when she gave him her shoulder and helped him in, not giving away how much she didn’t want to be there in the least to anyone who wasn’t close enough to feel her shaking.

The emergency room was surprisingly quiet. After the tailspin their life had taken since he’d first spoken to Heather it felt as if the world itself should be going haywire, the waiting room packed with folks nursing wounds from fangs and claws and unholy magic, but instead there were less patients than he’d even expect on a normal night. A girl he could tell with a cop’s practiced eye was in the middle of ODing was being wheeled deeper into the hospital as they entered, a few parents were there panicking over sick toddlers, a woman nursing a cut on her side that might have come from a knife or might just have been some kind of accident, nothing too terrible or unusual. A blessing, when it meant he’d be seen to quickly and she wouldn’t have to stay too long.

He got a scolding from the doctor that saw him for having walked on his leg and taking so long to get it tended to, displacing the fracture if there had ever been any chance that it was a clean break, but it wasn’t so badly shifted that they couldn’t realign and set it without surgery. He hated how long it took even more than he hated the pain, aware at every moment that she was waiting for him somewhere alone with her hatred of the hospital and the doctors and all the memories they brought with them, but knew that it could have been much longer. She was saved from having to wait through the process of his leg being put in a cast by the fact that it had swollen, and in the end they wouldn’t do more than splint it and give him a prescription for painkillers to tide him over until he could make an appointment with a specialist.

She had fresh bandages when he saw her again, a deep cut on her arm had been stitched neatly shut and bloodsplatters on her skin washed away. It seemed the nurses had taken her for a patient as well, and he couldn’t imagine what they must have thought of the two of them coming in together in their states. Not anything bad enough to make something of it, or else there’d have been cops speaking to her and waiting for him, and he wondered what kind of lies she’d spun them to set their minds at ease.

Whatever it was, he hoped she’d had the sense to give them fake information about herself as well. He knew, though he hadn’t told her yet, that things might well get tough for her once they reported what had happened to her father. Having hospital records from the same day she called in his death about injuries that looked like they came from a fight wouldn’t make things any easier.

She relaxed obviously the moment they entered the parking lot, enough so that the orderly pushing his wheelchair (despite Douglas’ protests that he needed neither of them) gave her a curious look. “Not good with doctors, huh?” he asked. “Listen, just let someone know if you ever have to come in again, we’re all used to it. You might be able to get a sedative if it’s bad enough.”

“Uh, thanks. I’ll keep that in mind,” she told him in a tone that said she did not intend to ever return to take that advice if she could help it.

They reached the car with no incident, no bottomless pit opened up between them and it to trap them there, the orderly did not morph into some terrible monster and attack but just helped him into his seat then walked away with a friendly wave, for all Heather’s fear there was nothing terrible or even unusual about that hospital. Yet once she was back in the driver’s seat she made no move to leave.

After a long moment of silence she quietly admitted, “Douglas? I don’t know where to go.”

And damn but he ached for the poor kid, because he recognized that pain in her voice. She’d been holding up well, much better than he’d ever imagine a girl her age would deal with a loved one being murdered, even if a good portion of what had been sustaining her since coming home to find that corpse was a quest for bloody revenge. But it was only now that she didn’t have anything left to distract her from her loss that he’d really see how well she Could deal with it.

“Whatever else you do, you know you can’t just leave in there,” he said gently, but when she tensed added, “We can find some place for you to rest a little, and clean up, but listen to me Heath—Cheryl, because this is important. The coroner will be able to tell that he’s been dead a good while before they were notified, and the police _will_ wonder why it took you so long to report it. You shouldn’t put it off.”

He’d seen her face seven kinds of hell since he’d met her, but none of them had made her look as horrified as she did at those words. “You think they’ll think _I_ did this? How… how could they ever… I…” Tears welled up in her eyes as she stammered, and he tried to remember if he’d seen her cry even once before then. He knew that she’d done it, he could remember seeing tracks from them in the splattered grime on her face when he first saw her after discovering the body, but she’d kept her grief private.

He could understand it. But that in itself could be seen as a mark against her, if she got the wrong person working on her case. Someone who thought grief didn’t exist if it wasn’t plain to see.

“I didn’t want to say anything sooner,” he admitted. “You’ve been through so much so fast without having to worry about something like this. Especially when we were cut off from contacting them sooner. But I promise I’ll do everything I can to keep them from blaming you. I’ll tell them how Claudia played me for a patsy, that she was a member of the group who tried to kidnap you back in Portland. If I hand over the results of my investigation they might buy that Claudia and her cronies would have murdered him as revenge for taking you and killing one of their men when he tried to take you back then.”

She slammed her hands down on the steering wheel and gave him one of the glares he’d been lucky enough to avoid since she’d accepted him as an ally. “You want me to tell them my dad _kidnapped me?_ That they were just trying to _take me back_? I—I’d rather they thought I did it, I’d rather go to jail! He’s already dead, I can’t let people start thinking her was a monster too.”

“No, not a monster,” Douglas told her, reaching out of rest his hand on her shoulder but expecting her to yank away at any second. “I never thought that. A man who somehow lost his little girl right after his wife and went a little crazy when he saw a baby who reminded him of her, a guy you’d have to pity.”

“And you think that’s any better?” she asked, looking at him like he’d suddenly become a stranger. “Why did you even believe that something like that could be true to begin with?”

“Listen, I really am sorry Cheryl. But if you don’t know what you’re looking at then when you dig into him it looks like the truth. Seventeen years ago Harry Mason came back from a vacation and suddenly packed up everything and vanished without a word to anyone, not even his family. Did you even know you have grandparents?” She shook her head silently, eyes wide at the idea she still had some family left in the year. “All four of them left, if you consider his wife your mom. All of them completely broken up when I talked to them because they didn’t know whether either of you are alive or dead. Next time he turns up it’s across the country when he shot a man trying to kidnap his five-year-old daughter, who should have been eleven. I knew you were supposed to look young for your age now, but ain’t nobody gonna mistake a preteen for a kindergartner to record it wrong back then. And then,” He shrugged and scratched at his beard, embarrassed by how well he’d been played, “well, nothing I found added up if you were supposed to be the real Cheryl. Like, when he took off he suddenly switched to homeschooling you and kept you out of any kinda extracurricular when you'd been part of plenty of kids clubs before; he couldn’t have just suddenly had his daughter stop taking classes without it being investigated but if she’d been replaced by some new baby too young for school he couldn’t let anyone see her either. Then all of a sudden the work just cut out right when she should’ve been ready to graduate, until you strolled in a few years later and tested for the GED. Just about when a kid years younger than the real Cheryl Mason would’ve gotten old enough to get away with claiming she just looked young for her age.”

She leaned forward to rest her forehead against her hands on the steering wheel, closing her eyes. He could tell that he’d gotten through to her, that she realized how bad it sounded. “So you thought my dad had gone nuts and snatched me out of a cradle somewhere. So why the hell didn’t you just call the cops on him instead of leading Claudia to us? You used to be one of them, wouldn’t that have been the law-abiding thing to do?”

 _He’d still be alive if you had_ , Douglas could hear the accusation in his ear even though she left it unsaid. And it was true. He might be in jail, or at least under investigation, but nobody would have left Heather an orphan if he’d chosen to turn his investigation over to the local authorities instead of keeping Claudia’s case. But he’d thought he was doing the right thing at the time. “I’d been watching long enough to know that he loved you, and you loved him,” he admitted with a sigh. “However he might have come by you, I didn’t want to rip that apart on you. Claudia said she just wanted to talk, to let you know where you’d come from and let you make your own choice about what to do. It seemed like the kinder choice.”

“And now either people will think he did it anyway, or they’ll think I murdered him. Which will _still_ make them think there must have been something horrible about him, if I’d just snap and stab him to death!” Then her eyes snapped open with a gasp, and she stared at him with a look he didn’t recognize. Like someone else, much closer to the edge of madness then the girl he’d gotten to know, was staring out through her. “Or he could be alive.”

Douglas laughed, even though there was nothing funny about what she’d said, unease grinding the sound out of him. “Kid, I’m pretty sure you don’t have a time machine tucked away in any of your vest pockets.”

“No, Douglas, _I’ve done this before._ Being in the hospital brought back memories of it.” She started chattering faster, like she was trying to outrun any doubts about what she was saying. “There was this woman, a nurse. She took care of me, and she got killed. And I brought her back. I brought her back just like she was, as long as nothing made her remember what happened. If I let Alessa… if I let _myself_ remember more about that time I bet I could do it again. I could move his body to the other side until we can find somewhere to bury him right; it was there before that stupid god was ever brought over, I’ve sure I could get us there for just a second.”

“Cheryl.” Douglas clasped her shoulder again, gripping more tightly than perhaps he should have. “You’ve got to know this is crazy talk. You can’t just bring people back from the dead.”

A little of the not-her madness faded from her eyes, leaving just the bitter sorrow he was more used to behind. “No, I can’t. I know that now. I wouldn’t try to force him to stay around like I did with Lisa. But, Douglas, I could at least do it long enough to fool other people. You said he’d taken off without a word to anyone once before, twice if you count when we went into hiding after the break-in. I could make my dad good enough to fool anyone else long enough to have him move out.” She turned her face away from him, and reached up to toy with the pendent she was wearing. “I don’t _want_ to be Alessa. I don’t want to have her powers, they can do so many awful things and they never brought her, brought me, anything good in our life. But this is, like, the one chance I might ever have to make them work for me. If I can save my dad’s name without having to go to jail to do it, it’d be worth vomiting up a freaking god.”

Douglas didn’t know how to argue with that. Wouldn’t he have done the same in her shoes? If he’d had the power to yank his boy’s corpse out of the bank before anyone could ID it then have a copy of him wave goodbye to everyone as he claimed to set out to make a new life for himself somewhere far away wouldn’t he have done it? The pain of having him go silent after moving wouldn’t have been as bad on everyone who didn’t know the truth as the pain of his having died a petty crook. Maybe make the fake claim he was going off to join the Army, and everyone would assume he died a hero when he vanished.

“Listen, let’s just find a hotel somewhere and we can talk about this some more after sleeping. I don’t think dabbling with half-remembered magic is something you should be considering when you haven’t slept in two days, and I don’t think _I’m_ in any state to come up with decent arguments against it either. Deal?”

The look in her eyes told him that she didn’t expect a few hours of sleep to make any difference in her resolve, and the girl was so mule-stubborn that he doubted it would either, but she nodded anyway. “Yeah. Yeah, if I don’t find a place to sleep soon I might just go find a gurney to curl up on no matter _how_ much I hate them, and then I’d be seriously upset when I woke up and realized where I was. I’m okay with sharing a room with two beds to save money; hell, with how tired I am toss a pillow on the ground of a room with a single and I’d be good.”

“Whatever you decide to do, I promise I'll help you out any way you want me to. But don’t think we’re not talking about this more when you wake up,” he warned her.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t go trying to dad me when he isn’t even cold yet,” she said, finally firing up the engine now that she had a goal in mind for where to head. But she shot him a fond look as she started to pull out of their space. “But I promise I’ll listen you your advice as a friend.”


End file.
